


oh no (i really shouldn't stay)

by subtlyhaught



Category: Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/F, and trini has internalized homophobia, i am nit lucud, i struggled w the end of this so bad but i finally did it, jason/kim is mentioned, kim is not happy, lotta angst, rIP SEE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21775531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtlyhaught/pseuds/subtlyhaught
Summary: She weighs the pros and cons of telling Kimberly the truth, of how she’s always known.
Relationships: Kimberly Hart/Trini
Comments: 3
Kudos: 54





	oh no (i really shouldn't stay)

**Author's Note:**

> i finally. wrote something. after two years of loving pr. wow.
> 
> song is based off how jagger finn by vas makes me feel! also where the title is from  
> also thank you to mads for putting up w my bs and reading this

“Kim?”

Kim looks up at her, her eyes glassy. She doesn’t say anything.

Trini tries again. “Kim, I’m sorry.”

Kimberly nods, sniffling loudly. Her hands find the old carpet below her, knotting themselves in loose wisps gained from years and years of walking. She tries for a smile, but it comes out wobbly. “Yeah,” she says, sucking in a breath. 

Trini balls her hands in her comforter, gnawing on her lip, unsure of what to do next. She tastes Kim’s strawberry chapstick on her tongue, can feel the spot her hands had burned love notes into her skin, and it only confuses her more, dulls her morality. 

She looks at Kim again, unable to help herself. The pink ranger is sitting on her floor, maybe a foot away from her, looking pensive. Her chin is smeared with lip gloss, and her hands shake just barely, even twisted into her carpet like they were. It was clear she had been crying. Her eyes were red rimmed. The skin around it, normally soft and virtually flawless, is puffy and irritated, as though she had been wiping at it. 

The sight broke Trini’s heart. 

Kim clears her throat then, drawing Trini’s eyes to her face (as though she hadn’t already been looking). Her hands shift in the carpet, now picking at the wisps, rather than winding them around her fingers. Her eyes flit to the floor, then to meet Trini’s, then back to the floor. Trini was almost convinced she wasn’t going to speak, when;

“How long have you known?”

Trini panics. “About what?”

Kimberly lolls her head to the side, giving Trini a look like  _ you know what.  _ It was the most herself she looked all night. 

Trini swallows loudly, her own hands tightening in the comforter. She weighs the pros and cons of telling Kimberly the truth, of how she’s always known. How she used to sit in the back of their biology class and burn holes into the back of Kim’s head. How she used to watch Ty Fleming wind his hand around hers when she kissed him in the parking lot. How she cried the night of the campfire because Kim had been looking at her - looking  _ through  _ her. 

And then she had been looking at Jason. 

And Trini knew. 

Her eyes filled with tears before she could help herself, and it only made her feel stupid. Of course,  _ of course  _ she did this. Fall for the ranger she can’t have. And of course she just had to let her know at the most inopportune moment. Leave it to Trini to fuck everything up.

Her hands contort even more aggressively in the comforter. Her throat feels tight, her vision blurry, but she’s trying to give Kim an answer, she really is. She’s trying to say  _ always, I’ve always known,  _ or at least  _ for a while. _ And yet, here she sat, in total silence, tears welling up in her eyes and chest constricting and being so,  _ so  _ stupid. 

Kim must’ve noticed. It wouldn’t have been hard, really, but Trini likes to think she does a good job at hiding her emotions. Though with the pink ranger scrambling across the carpet all of a sudden, rushing to get in front of Trini, she isn’t so sure her facade was as foolproof as she hopes it is. 

Her hands find Trini’s knees, warm through the material of her jeans, almost grounding her in place with their familiarity. Kim begins rubbing circles into her kneecaps, using her thumbs, moving gently. She’s delicate as she does it, in a way that should tickle but somehow doesn’t. She’d done this before - on nights when Trini woke up shaking, when Kim’s power coin would vibrate at a frequency that could shatter glass. It brought Trini back down. 

Down to Kim.

Maybe that was the problem, this time around. 

Trini’s breaths come in rib tremouring shudders - half contained, half controlling. Every one shakes past her lips, and she shuts her eyes, hoping they aren’t hitting Kimberly’s face. She doesn’t need to cry  _ and  _ be gross on top of it. 

Kim is speaking, but if Trini doesn’t focus on her voice, she can’t hear the words. Maybe she doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to hear her reassurances or her apologies or whatever she might be spewing. Maybe, if she lives permanently in her chasm of soundproof void, everything will just disappear. She’ll be okay. She’ll go numb.

God, this is  _ her  _ fault, and she’s the one crying. She’s the one shutting down. 

“I’m sorry,” just barely manages to slip past her lips. 

Kim is shaking her head, pulling gently on Trini’s jeans. “No,” she says, and her hands drift up to Trini’s, slipping around her fingers. “No, don’t be sorry--” 

“I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Trini continues, barely hearing Kim. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have kissed you, that was so  _ stupid--” _

“Trini,” Kim says, more forcefully this time, and Trini’s eyes shift into focus again. “Stop. It’s okay.”

Trini shakes her head. “No, god, Kim I-- you just broke up with Jason, and-- and I just took  _ advantage  _ of you and--  _ fuck.”  _

Kim pulls her lip between her teeth, and her eyebrows knit together. She’s thinking, thinking  _ hard,  _ and fear bubbles up in Trini’s stomach. She’s gonna lose her. This is it, this is the moment Kim realizes the kind of person Trini is, the moment Trini’s been waiting for; for Kim to be disgusted, to wrinkle her nose as though she smells something foul, for her to leave with a comment on how fucking  _ gross  _ it is that Trini’s been harboring these feelings, these thoughts. 

For Kim to tell her that her parents are right. 

“Trini, listen,” Kim sighs, and her grip on Trini’s hands tightens. Trini’s breathing has slowed a bit, likely in response to Kim’s calm composure, but her eyes are still blurry with tears, distorting Kim’s face.

She brings Trini’s hands to her face, and Trini doesn’t know what’s happening any more.

“Yeah, you had really shitty timing,” Kim says, cracking a small, kind of comedic smile, and Trini just gets more and more confused. “Like,  _ awful  _ timing, but I’m not rejecting you. Or, I guess, I forgive you. I should lead with that. But I’m also not rejecting you.”

What the fuck is Trini supposed to say to that.

“What?” she rasps, her voice feeling dry. Kim’s skin is warm under her fingertips, soft, almost distracting. Kim holds holds them in place via Trini’s wrists, making sure she can’t run. Grounding her. It doesn’t make any sense.

“I mean, I’m not saying I’m ready to jump into another relationship, or anything like that,” Kim starts, and Trini has trouble keeping up with her words. “I did just, yknow, go through a break up maybe, like, 30 minutes ago, and I’m definitely a bit of an emotional mess right now, but point and case is I kissed you back. Sort of.”

Trini just stares. She blinks, and the tears that still resided in her eyes roll down her cheeks, but no more gather. “Sort of?” she manages, shaking her head a bit to try and clear it.

“I was crying, you kind of caught me off guard.” Kim says, and she laughs a bit, and Trini is so, so lost.

“But you,” she tries, closing her eyes for a minute to think. “Um, but, I? You just, like... what? You just, sat there?”

And instantly, Kim’s face goes cold again. 

Trini’s heart falls into her stomach. 

She pulls herself away from Trini’s hands and sits back on her heels, out of the yellow rangers reach. There’s something new in her gaze, something dark and personal, and Trini doesn’t know what to make of it, doesn’t know how to read Kim in this moment. 

She doesn’t speak for a second. Then, almost jarringly loud in comparison, she sniffles, wrinkling her nose and bringing up hand up to swipe at her face. “Sorry,” she says, and Trini’s lost on the word. 

“For what?” She asks.

“I uh,” Kim says, clearing her throat. Her eyes fixate on something faroff, just passed Trini’s ear, and when she speaks, her voice sounds completely detached from her body. “Jason says I use humor as a coping mechanism,” she starts, “and I guess he’s right. We argued a lot. Mostly about stupid things. Sometimes about me.” Her eyes shift, meeting Trini’s again, and there are tears there now. Kim tries for a smile, but it’s shaky, and it disappears just as fast as it appears. “I’m scared, Trini. That’s why I just sat there.”

Trini swallows audibly. “Of me?”

Kim shakes her head. “God, no, of course not,” she says, sniffing again. “I’m scared of  _ me.” _

And Trini’s been confused for most of this conversation, but she’s never been more lost than in this moment. 

She slides onto the floor, careful not to touch Kim with her knees, unsure of how she’d react. There’s something off, something unsettling about the tension in Kim’s shoulders. Trini doesn’t like it. She seems so small; so oddly careful around the yellow ranger all of a sudden, despite her having a) barely moved and b) been touching Trini not three minutes ago. It caused some sort of eruption of butterflies in Trini’s stomach; something that felt oddly enough like guilt. Maybe nerves. Trini was never good at the whole feeling thing. 

“Why?” she asks, the word still scraping against the back of her throat, despite her tears having ceased.

Kim tries for a smile again, really does try this time, Trini can tell, but the bunching of her cheeks causes the tears that had welled up in her eyes to spill, and Trini doesn’t know if she’s ever looked less herself. This wasn’t  _ her  _ Kim, the one who grabbed her by the straps of her backpack and threw her off a cliff, the one who snuck into Trini’s room despite all her warnings, the one who chopped all her hair off on an impulse, the one with the delicate touch and reassuring whispers. 

“I’m probably the worst person you’ve ever met,” she says. She sounds like she’s trying to add humor into it, to make the statement more lighthearted, something she can laugh about, but her eyes pool with more tears as the words leave her mouth, and Trini doesn’t know what to do. 

“Because of Ty?” she asks, trying to fill the silence.

Kim almost scoffs. “No,” she says, then pauses for a moment, and her eyes fall to her lap. “Yes, but not only because of Ty, also ‘cause of me, who I am, inside. I’m an  _ awful  _ person, Trini. And I… I try, I try so hard to hide it, to be good, but god everything I do ends up  _ fucked,  _ and the common factor is me. It’s me. There’s no other explanation.”

It takes a minute for everything to process. 

Kim is watching Trini with this great big abyss engulfing her. It resides in her gaze, bites at her fingers, consumes her completely and it leaves Trini staring at nothing. It feels as though Kim is barely there. This big, boisterous personality, this do all way of hers, everything that made Kimberly Ann Hart, seemed to dissipate. And it left Kim, just Kim, the Kim that Trini knew somewhere in the back of her mind, sitting on Trini’s floor.

“What are you talking about?” Trini says, and it’s the best she can do, but god, she's  _ trying.  _ “Kim, you  _ are  _ good. You are to me.” 

Kim opens her mouth to speak, but with a sudden burst of confidence, with an innate certainty, Trini beats her to it.

_“You_ are my one good thing,” she says, and Kim’s mouth clamps shut.

Trini can tell she doesn’t believe her. It’s in the twitch of her lips, the way her eyebrow quirks, the way Trini just knows impossible things about Kim like that. Or at least, the way she thought she did. 

“Yeah,” Kim says, and there’s a twinge of her usual self in the word. But then she’s clearing her throat, and her hands are moving, then her legs, and suddenly, Kim is rising to her feet and Trini can only watch. 

Kim bites her lip, and Trini knows that if she mimicked the action, she’d still taste strawberry chapstick. 

“I should go,” she says, and then she’s moving faster than Trini has ever seen.

She loses any words she could say on her tongue, any form of  _ wait,  _ or  _ stay,  _ or  _ please.  _ Kim is whipping around her room, picking up her bag and her jacket, both of which were strewn across the floor courtesy of Trini’s wandering hands. 

“Kim,” Trini tries, but the word has no traction. Kim is already halfway through her open window.

She pauses, glaces over her shoulder at Trini, and Trini swears there’s something there, something under her gaze that she’s trying to tell her. She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it again, drags her lip between her teeth.

“I’m sorry,” just stumbles past her lips, and then she’s gone. 

Trini is left staring at a vacant window, feeling cold. Or angry. Or lonely. Or maybe just sad, she wasn’t really sure. 

Kim has always been an enigma, always had layers and layers to her, things that made her complex, things Trini didn’t always understand. She had spent hours trying to figure Kim out. From the back of their biology classroom, from the parking lot, across the pit. She always came up empty, always falling a little short, grabbing after answers to the walking riddle that was Kimberly Ann Hart. 

Something in her bones told her to go after Kim, to perform some big gesture, to get her to fall into her arms. It had been months since Trini hadn’t fallen asleep with the scent of jasmine shampoo clinging to her sheets, even while Kim had been dating Jason. The entire conversation had left a sour taste on Trini’s tongue, and she needed answers, explanations. Maybe, if she ran after her, if she called her name and cupped her face, if she pressed questions to Kim’s lips, if she begged her for the reasons and the responses, maybe she’d get an answer. Maybe she’d solve her enigma.

But Trini stayed put, strawberry chapstick still on her lips, wondering if Kim scraped her knees in the landing. 

**Author's Note:**

> @ i-said-oops on tumblr


End file.
